When 'trust me' isn't enough

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Chutzpah: a lovely little word to describe the audacity involved in making outrageous statements or claims, one of the few skills which ministers in the UK Government seem to be honing to a fine edge.  Yesterday, it was the Foreign Secretary’s turn to try his skills, claiming to EU leaders and officials that the departure of 7 MPs from the Labour Party meant that they should not trust the Labour Party, because that party is badly split.

But the real chutzpah comes in the claim that they should instead trust the Tories.  This is a government to which the real opposition is another party operating inside it, a government which is in office but no longer in power, a government whose leader is reduced to making increasingly desperate pleas to its own party’s members for support – pleas which are largely being laughed at by those to whom they are addressed.  It is also a government with which the EU27 spent two years reaching an agreement on which it is now trying to find a way of reneging.

In the position of the EU27, I’d certainly be wary of trusting Labour, but ‘wary’ is a wholly inadequate word to describe how I’d feel about dealing with the Tories.  Their chutzpah skills may be improving, but they still have a lot to learn about not taking it so far that it just makes them look stupid.